64-bit support is not just a recompile away. And no, this is not due to treating memory pointers and 32-bit integers interchangeably. There are assorted non-portable pieces that need to be upgraded first, notably the JIT compiler in the virtual machine (transforms ActionScript into native x86_64 code) and the garbage collection engine. Tinic outlined these items in this post.
--penguin.swf (Penguin.SWF tracks development status and issues regarding the Linux version of Adobe's Flash Player)
I worked exclusively through thin clients for a year at my last job and absolutely hated it.
It was slow, and ungainly and every now and then - from a few hours to a couple of months - someone else's X session windows would pop up on my screen. Wonderful in an environment where we worked with secret (as in classified as) information. We knew the problem, and the IT guys could usually fix it in a few minutes, but the fix always seemed to be temporary somehow.
Not to mention you're costing productivity for people like me who tend to work very rapidly via esoteric hotkeys, and rapid fire keystrokes, and using the keyboard buffer to issue commands to dialogs, context menus, windows that haven't yet appeared. One of my earliest employers once described seeing me work at a computer as "really making that thing sing". So sticking me on a slow machine or dumb terminal is costing you my productivity and happiness. And it's not like a decent machine $1500-2000 is really that big of a deal spread out over the several years it will last. Especially if it's one more straw kept off of the camel's back that keeps me for looking for another job and costing you domain knowledge and experience with your unique problems when I leave.
IMO, thin clients should be reserved for "guest" users who will only be temporarily using your network where no degree of customization or where speed is not important. Like an interactive presentation or a library, or some temporary event.
Natural selection is still at work, it's just that modern medicine and population size have lowered the bar to the floor in developed places.
Even if you barely make it through birth and infancy with the aid of doctors and incubators, you still might make it to breed. Even if, on top of that you're mildly retarded, and end up unattractive, unhealthy, and malformed, chances are pretty good that there's still someone out there you can reproduce with. And for an additional twist, if you're rich, or your daddy is, you can probably pay some woman to have your offspring, if you don't necessarily get to plant the seed yourself.
Now this is mostly first world nations I'm speaking of. In third world countries I would contend that evolution is alive and well. Parts of Africa are the perfect example. If I were to place a bet on where the cure for AIDS will come from it's not some multi billion dollar pharma lab. It's some podunk village in Africa. Not because some researcher there was working with them, but because AIDS is so rampant down there that sooner or later, some lucky human being will be born with, or develop immunity, or just be unaffected entirely. For precisely the same reasons we're starting to see tricolsan resistant bacteria - antibacterial soap is all the rage.
The bar in some places is still pretty high, and thus evolution continues, but I think it's slowed for a lot of us.
Because there isn't one linux distro like there's essentially one Mac distro. The differences can be enough to make what would work on one, not work on another. So while there might be more linux gamers, there aren't more....say...Ubuntu gamers. And FYI, Blizzard, EVE Online officially supports linux.
Further, I'm sure many or all of the artsy fuckers at Blizzard use Macs, so macs have a toehold in the company. So they get more attention.
Try this, take the tech support info off your resumé. (You are applying to jobs that require resumés not just applications, right?)
Pretend you never had the job and had some menial IT job instead. Say your projects were the fruit of that job, and don't present the projects, but talk about them as accomplishments (since most companyies would retain the rights to them had you actually been paid to create them you can't show the code to a perspective employer).
If they're not projects that a business could conceivably paid you to create, then start a new one project that could be.
If they still won't hire you, it's not the "tech support stigma" it's you.
The reason I suggest this is that I have a hard time believing that some tech support stigma is the thing preventing you from getting a job. I got a job after college with zero professional experience in programming. I had a recommendation from one of my professors on my side, but no experience to speak of.
If you get the first interview your resume can't be that bad, so you've got to be flunking the first interview somehow, my guess is it's not the tech support job, but you can try the above and find out.
It's a bit of a lie to omit the tech support work, but it's not really relevant anyway, so omitting it might be more like cutting out extraneous information. Or if you're not comfortable with that, reduce that job to a footnote in your resume to minimize it's impact. Up until recently I had to pad my resume with bullshit job information like computer aided drafting operation and working in a shoe store. There was a different section on my resumé for "relevant experience" where all the stuff that career employers would care about. I kept it on there because it proved I could at least show up and hold down a job long term, but that was the only value it added. I recommend a similar format for you.
Your tech support background is not a qualification, it's just proof that you'll show up and stick around, nothing more.
And if they're "clearly looking for recent graduates" do you not realize, that after two years, you're not one?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I really don't think the tech support is what's holding you back, it's that you haven't done computer engineering academically or professionally for two years, or you're just flunking the interview. Personal projects mean little unless they're marketable or incredibly sophisticated pieces of work.
Maybe you could show them some sample code? Not to impress them with what your code can do - because you rarely will - but impress them with the quality of your actual source code. Is it readable? Is easily understood? Is it maintainable? Is there documentation? Is it well commented? Does it have a full set of unit tests?
Kinda all over the map here, but I hope something helps!
Conversely, never write your own little calendar applet if you can grab the code off the web. Plenty of work out there without requiring everything to be crafted with your own unique style.
I would amend this to read, "Never write your own calendar/Date code period." I know the parent poster is talking about a GUI widget, but this brings up a tangential point. Don't try and create your own Date/Calendar utility. Getting one 100% right on your own is nigh impossible. For example, the Gregorian Calendar code in Java 1.5 is 2900 lines long. Heavily commented, but still. Getting a date/calendar correct is a non-trivial task. For example, we once had a customer try to get us to send dates in "their format" which mean 12 months of exactly 30 days. It was one of the few times we told a customer to pound sand. That's how you do it wrong.
For my own points: Get The Pragmatic Programmer, Mastering Regular Expressions, and spend some time writing C. Not C++, C. You'll learn intimately what's going on behind the scenes in higher level languages when you instantiate something, and how pointers really work. You'll especially appreciate string classes after living with unterminated character arrays.:-)
Learn a scripting language you can use in your current environment. I recommend perl or bash (google advanced bash scripting guide). Perl is available about anywhere, so is bash via Cygwin on windows.
Find a good editor/IDE for your language(s). For Java I recommend IntelliJ IDEA if you can get them to buy it (I'd buy it myself if my company wouldn't). For me Eclipse is a distant second, but it's free. I'll leave C++, C# etc. up to someone else to recommend editors/IDEs for.
I'm an American, but I've steadfastly avoided the rhetoric of anyone with strong party affiliations in any direction. The moment someone makes makes a derogatory remark about [political party] is the moment their opinions get modded down in my head to "irrelevant". The only ideal I unflaggingly adhere to is an individual thinking for themselves.
Sadly abolishing political parties will not work. Even if we managed to get rid of the ones we have, people would band together - each compromising on some points - so that they could accomplish more mutual goals by force of numbers. Or did you think that every democrat/republican/et al came up with the same ideas individually and they all just happened to agree? It's that compromising and loss of individuality that I find so repugnant and disingenuous. In fact, you could almost say it was unamerican! Or as Tom Stewart put it, (I'm paraphrasing, but you'll get the gist): "Freedom in America is the right to choose between two men every four years." And it's disappointing.
But it's all pretty moot anyway, as has recently come to light from the glare of this government bail out, The Banks have all the real power. Watch that, through "Money as Debt 5 of 5". It's about an hour long, but it's unbelievable, true, and scary.
For all their faults, Microsoft have always been more developer friendly than Apple.
You've clearly never used Microsoft BizTalk's mapping tool.
The goal of it seems to have been to get the engineer out of coding, but what it accomplished was getting the ability to use your keyboard out of coding. Everything must start with a drag and drop. And you cannot copy & paste! Here's how one of my coworkers who had to work with it extensively described it:
With just 13 easy pictures, 16 lines, 29 labels, 6 logic gates, and a lot of experience with this system, you can totally get rid of this Java code:
if (firstObject.isA()) {
if (secondObject.isB()) {
thirdObject.performAction(Constant.VALUE_1);
}
}
The object names were changed to protect the innocent (Java code).
I kid you not. It took him, an experienced user of the BizTalk mapping tool, about 20 minutes to recreate that after the lack of an undo function cost him all of it.
Select politicans by random. It is fair and ensures that no societal special interests get any priority.
I like this idea except for there should be a form of filtering after the random selection so we don't get guys like these running the country.
Maybe a basic logic or IQ test and a "do you believe you're the a deity/the president" test. There is "ordinary citizen" and there is bat-shit insane. Let's confine our representatives to the former.
publicly available information that is lawfully made available to the general public
I wonder if this couldn't be pried open to include SSNs that are publicly available from court or property documents. It certainly looks like it. It also looks like if you remove the last name, you can send their SSN, credit card number and password all together.
I don't know what's worse, a legal system where "loopholes" are enough for you to be excluded, or a society that needs a legal system that attempts (and inevitably fails at) covering every possibility.
More likely, the pictures of such a system be scrutinized and they'd see your car with multiple license plates and take you to jail. You have to keep in mind that this system is being pushed by traffic camera and red light camera companies. So there will be pictures.
I can blow $150 on lunch when I'm traveling without even needing to get my immediate manager to sign off an approve the reimbursement as long as I don't spend more than $250/day on meals/incidentals/entertainment, but getting reimbursed $29.95 for some shareware app I can't live without requires approval by the vice-president (my boss' boss' boss), who requires our department to submit purchase requests in batches no more than once per quarter.
So go to "lunch" and "entertain" a software development company for $29.95.
Your post, and even the link you provided are missing something extremely important. A definition of "children". If you definition of children includes sexually mature humans in their late teens, but still children by some legal definition then it's really a rather misleading statistic, don't you think? There's a reason they're called jailbait. They're physically mature enough to be sexually attractive to other members of the species for no other reason than the basic human desire to procreate that we all share, but legally, and perhaps morally off limits.
I couldn't care less about the "Incognito"/porn mode. What I care about is proper window/tab isolation. That is, threading or forking. IE8 will have it. Chrome has it, I'm really tired of waiting for FF to catch up.
In fact, the only reason I still use FF at all is that it supports must-have extensions like adblock and flashblock. And a less necessary, but still - for me vital - extension: Foxmarks with its "Use own server" option.
I don't mean to attack directly, but you seem to be just well informed enough to be dangerous. First, you seem to think a quick reboot is something that should be no big deal and happen rather often. This is kind of appalling. If you need to reboot a computer often (more than to install new hardware), something serious is wrong with it or it's OS.
Secondly, this phrase, "Hard drives need explicit defragmenting" is misleading as all hell. Hard drives do not need defragmenting. They're made of platters, heads, etc. It's a filesystem that need fragmented. If you want to really nit-pick, it's files within file systems. Still, not hard drives.
Some filesystems are much more prone to fragmentation than others. Namely FAT, FAT32, and NTFS. They have no fragmentation prevention measures. Luckily there are good tools available to defragment them. Other filesystems like ext3 have built in fragmentation-prevention techniques that go a long way, so it's not nearly so big of an issue. They do have defragmentation programs but they don't seem to be trusted by some experts.
As for RAM fragmentation, it's such a non-issue that it's worth explaining. Note that it's Random Access Memory! It's designed to be read randomly. So reading two contiguous blocks is no faster than reading two blocks on opposite ends of the stick or address space. Hence fragmentation is a complete non-issue. And it's a near certainty that your RAM defragger will waste more time than just leaving the RAM alone. Assuming it's not just scamware anyway.
So why does that make your post dangerous? Perpetuating the myth that rebooting is cool and normal is harmful in the long run. It's harder on hardware and hell on uptimes. As is perpetuating the misunderstanding that hard drives need defragmented. Some undereducated, child-of-nepotism CTO might read your post, then take it to heart to the detriment of some entire company and all of their clients. Rebooting machines willy-nilly and attempting to defragment hard drives. In any case, misinformation on a public forum is dangerous, okay?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a great idea....for the telemarketers to use.
Convince them that their phone number is actually the phone number of a nice old lady, who has actually had that number for 50 years.
No no no, take another step back.
There should be no income tax: The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. -- Albert Einstein
Why couldn't you just quote it like this:
--penguin.swf (Penguin.SWF tracks development status and issues regarding the Linux version of Adobe's Flash Player)
I worked exclusively through thin clients for a year at my last job and absolutely hated it.
It was slow, and ungainly and every now and then - from a few hours to a couple of months - someone else's X session windows would pop up on my screen. Wonderful in an environment where we worked with secret (as in classified as) information. We knew the problem, and the IT guys could usually fix it in a few minutes, but the fix always seemed to be temporary somehow.
Not to mention you're costing productivity for people like me who tend to work very rapidly via esoteric hotkeys, and rapid fire keystrokes, and using the keyboard buffer to issue commands to dialogs, context menus, windows that haven't yet appeared. One of my earliest employers once described seeing me work at a computer as "really making that thing sing". So sticking me on a slow machine or dumb terminal is costing you my productivity and happiness. And it's not like a decent machine $1500-2000 is really that big of a deal spread out over the several years it will last. Especially if it's one more straw kept off of the camel's back that keeps me for looking for another job and costing you domain knowledge and experience with your unique problems when I leave.
IMO, thin clients should be reserved for "guest" users who will only be temporarily using your network where no degree of customization or where speed is not important. Like an interactive presentation or a library, or some temporary event.
Except site owners would just be lazy and use what everyone else is using, or just outright lie.
Natural selection is still at work, it's just that modern medicine and population size have lowered the bar to the floor in developed places.
Even if you barely make it through birth and infancy with the aid of doctors and incubators, you still might make it to breed. Even if, on top of that you're mildly retarded, and end up unattractive, unhealthy, and malformed, chances are pretty good that there's still someone out there you can reproduce with. And for an additional twist, if you're rich, or your daddy is, you can probably pay some woman to have your offspring, if you don't necessarily get to plant the seed yourself.
Now this is mostly first world nations I'm speaking of. In third world countries I would contend that evolution is alive and well. Parts of Africa are the perfect example. If I were to place a bet on where the cure for AIDS will come from it's not some multi billion dollar pharma lab. It's some podunk village in Africa. Not because some researcher there was working with them, but because AIDS is so rampant down there that sooner or later, some lucky human being will be born with, or develop immunity, or just be unaffected entirely. For precisely the same reasons we're starting to see tricolsan resistant bacteria - antibacterial soap is all the rage.
The bar in some places is still pretty high, and thus evolution continues, but I think it's slowed for a lot of us.
Because there isn't one linux distro like there's essentially one Mac distro. The differences can be enough to make what would work on one, not work on another. So while there might be more linux gamers, there aren't more....say...Ubuntu gamers. And FYI, Blizzard, EVE Online officially supports linux.
Further, I'm sure many or all of the artsy fuckers at Blizzard use Macs, so macs have a toehold in the company. So they get more attention.
Try this, take the tech support info off your resumé. (You are applying to jobs that require resumés not just applications, right?)
Pretend you never had the job and had some menial IT job instead. Say your projects were the fruit of that job, and don't present the projects, but talk about them as accomplishments (since most companyies would retain the rights to them had you actually been paid to create them you can't show the code to a perspective employer).
If they're not projects that a business could conceivably paid you to create, then start a new one project that could be.
If they still won't hire you, it's not the "tech support stigma" it's you.
The reason I suggest this is that I have a hard time believing that some tech support stigma is the thing preventing you from getting a job. I got a job after college with zero professional experience in programming. I had a recommendation from one of my professors on my side, but no experience to speak of.
If you get the first interview your resume can't be that bad, so you've got to be flunking the first interview somehow, my guess is it's not the tech support job, but you can try the above and find out.
It's a bit of a lie to omit the tech support work, but it's not really relevant anyway, so omitting it might be more like cutting out extraneous information. Or if you're not comfortable with that, reduce that job to a footnote in your resume to minimize it's impact. Up until recently I had to pad my resume with bullshit job information like computer aided drafting operation and working in a shoe store. There was a different section on my resumé for "relevant experience" where all the stuff that career employers would care about. I kept it on there because it proved I could at least show up and hold down a job long term, but that was the only value it added. I recommend a similar format for you.
Your tech support background is not a qualification, it's just proof that you'll show up and stick around, nothing more.
And if they're "clearly looking for recent graduates" do you not realize, that after two years, you're not one?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I really don't think the tech support is what's holding you back, it's that you haven't done computer engineering academically or professionally for two years, or you're just flunking the interview. Personal projects mean little unless they're marketable or incredibly sophisticated pieces of work.
Maybe you could show them some sample code? Not to impress them with what your code can do - because you rarely will - but impress them with the quality of your actual source code. Is it readable? Is easily understood? Is it maintainable? Is there documentation? Is it well commented? Does it have a full set of unit tests?
Kinda all over the map here, but I hope something helps!
I would amend this to read, "Never write your own calendar/Date code period." I know the parent poster is talking about a GUI widget, but this brings up a tangential point. Don't try and create your own Date/Calendar utility. Getting one 100% right on your own is nigh impossible. For example, the Gregorian Calendar code in Java 1.5 is 2900 lines long. Heavily commented, but still. Getting a date/calendar correct is a non-trivial task. For example, we once had a customer try to get us to send dates in "their format" which mean 12 months of exactly 30 days. It was one of the few times we told a customer to pound sand. That's how you do it wrong.
For my own points: :-)
Get The Pragmatic Programmer, Mastering Regular Expressions, and spend some time writing C. Not C++, C. You'll learn intimately what's going on behind the scenes in higher level languages when you instantiate something, and how pointers really work. You'll especially appreciate string classes after living with unterminated character arrays.
Learn a scripting language you can use in your current environment. I recommend perl or bash (google advanced bash scripting guide). Perl is available about anywhere, so is bash via Cygwin on windows.
Find a good editor/IDE for your language(s). For Java I recommend IntelliJ IDEA if you can get them to buy it (I'd buy it myself if my company wouldn't). For me Eclipse is a distant second, but it's free. I'll leave C++, C# etc. up to someone else to recommend editors/IDEs for.
From a comment on TFA:
Hey I use lynx you insensitive clod!
The reason you can't "clickjack"* is cause it's a text based browser. There ain't no clicking!
*I didn't RTFA, so I don't know how appropriate this term is.
Hear hear!
I'm an American, but I've steadfastly avoided the rhetoric of anyone with strong party affiliations in any direction. The moment someone makes makes a derogatory remark about [political party] is the moment their opinions get modded down in my head to "irrelevant". The only ideal I unflaggingly adhere to is an individual thinking for themselves.
Sadly abolishing political parties will not work. Even if we managed to get rid of the ones we have, people would band together - each compromising on some points - so that they could accomplish more mutual goals by force of numbers. Or did you think that every democrat/republican/et al came up with the same ideas individually and they all just happened to agree? It's that compromising and loss of individuality that I find so repugnant and disingenuous. In fact, you could almost say it was unamerican! Or as Tom Stewart put it, (I'm paraphrasing, but you'll get the gist): "Freedom in America is the right to choose between two men every four years." And it's disappointing.
But it's all pretty moot anyway, as has recently come to light from the glare of this government bail out, The Banks have all the real power. Watch that, through "Money as Debt 5 of 5". It's about an hour long, but it's unbelievable, true, and scary.
You've clearly never used Microsoft BizTalk's mapping tool.
The goal of it seems to have been to get the engineer out of coding, but what it accomplished was getting the ability to use your keyboard out of coding. Everything must start with a drag and drop. And you cannot copy & paste! Here's how one of my coworkers who had to work with it extensively described it:
The object names were changed to protect the innocent (Java code).
I kid you not. It took him, an experienced user of the BizTalk mapping tool, about 20 minutes to recreate that after the lack of an undo function cost him all of it.
I like this idea except for there should be a form of filtering after the random selection so we don't get guys like these running the country.
Maybe a basic logic or IQ test and a "do you believe you're the a deity/the president" test. There is "ordinary citizen" and there is bat-shit insane. Let's confine our representatives to the former.
I wonder if this couldn't be pried open to include SSNs that are publicly available from court or property documents. It certainly looks like it. It also looks like if you remove the last name, you can send their SSN, credit card number and password all together.
I don't know what's worse, a legal system where "loopholes" are enough for you to be excluded, or a society that needs a legal system that attempts (and inevitably fails at) covering every possibility.
More likely, the pictures of such a system be scrutinized and they'd see your car with multiple license plates and take you to jail. You have to keep in mind that this system is being pushed by traffic camera and red light camera companies. So there will be pictures.
So go to "lunch" and "entertain" a software development company for $29.95.
Your post, and even the link you provided are missing something extremely important. A definition of "children". If you definition of children includes sexually mature humans in their late teens, but still children by some legal definition then it's really a rather misleading statistic, don't you think? There's a reason they're called jailbait. They're physically mature enough to be sexually attractive to other members of the species for no other reason than the basic human desire to procreate that we all share, but legally, and perhaps morally off limits.
I couldn't care less about the "Incognito"/porn mode. What I care about is proper window/tab isolation. That is, threading or forking. IE8 will have it. Chrome has it, I'm really tired of waiting for FF to catch up.
In fact, the only reason I still use FF at all is that it supports must-have extensions like adblock and flashblock. And a less necessary, but still - for me vital - extension: Foxmarks with its "Use own server" option.
I don't mean to attack directly, but you seem to be just well informed enough to be dangerous. First, you seem to think a quick reboot is something that should be no big deal and happen rather often. This is kind of appalling. If you need to reboot a computer often (more than to install new hardware), something serious is wrong with it or it's OS.
Secondly, this phrase, "Hard drives need explicit defragmenting" is misleading as all hell. Hard drives do not need defragmenting. They're made of platters, heads, etc. It's a filesystem that need fragmented. If you want to really nit-pick, it's files within file systems. Still, not hard drives.
Some filesystems are much more prone to fragmentation than others. Namely FAT, FAT32, and NTFS. They have no fragmentation prevention measures. Luckily there are good tools available to defragment them. Other filesystems like ext3 have built in fragmentation-prevention techniques that go a long way, so it's not nearly so big of an issue. They do have defragmentation programs but they don't seem to be trusted by some experts.
As for RAM fragmentation, it's such a non-issue that it's worth explaining. Note that it's Random Access Memory! It's designed to be read randomly. So reading two contiguous blocks is no faster than reading two blocks on opposite ends of the stick or address space. Hence fragmentation is a complete non-issue. And it's a near certainty that your RAM defragger will waste more time than just leaving the RAM alone. Assuming it's not just scamware anyway.
So why does that make your post dangerous? Perpetuating the myth that rebooting is cool and normal is harmful in the long run. It's harder on hardware and hell on uptimes. As is perpetuating the misunderstanding that hard drives need defragmented. Some undereducated, child-of-nepotism CTO might read your post, then take it to heart to the detriment of some entire company and all of their clients. Rebooting machines willy-nilly and attempting to defragment hard drives. In any case, misinformation on a public forum is dangerous, okay?
That was a very credible post. Right up until you said "boxen".
Grown ups say "boxes".
I would like to try some sea rat.
After all, I like sea ants... Insects? Shrimp!
If you can't tell the difference, or the expensive one doesn't taste better to you, you're better off not buying it.
I thought that's what your taste buds were for.
So get Sumatra. It's to Foxit what Foxit is to Adobe Acrobat.
Adobe Acrobat Reader (I think you mean Reader) has been nothing but bloat since version 4, not 6.